I finally managed to get back to the library, and take some photos from the stacks.

Here's a picture stitched together from 18 individual "frames." (Six rows of three frames each, taken with the camera oriented horizontally.)

I won't go through all the background story again, but as for technical details, I used my Pentax K10D, this time with the 50-200mm lens (at 50mm). Exposures were 2.5 sec. @ f/11, ISO 100. The rest of the technical stuff was pretty much the same as last time.

Although most people would automatically reach for a wide angle lens in situations like this, I sometimes choose to go with a normal or short telephoto lens, even if it does mean I have to stitch together more frames for the final image. There are pluses and minuses to each approach, but shooting at what amounts to a portrait lens focal length seemed to work out nicely for me in this case.

The final picture is rather detailed. "Rather" meaning it's a little under 10,000 pixels wide, by more than 11,500 pixels tall. Resolution (of the final .tif, not this re-sized .jpg) is good enough to show enormous amounts of fine detail on the spines of the books at the far end of the atrium.

While I'll undoubtedly tweak it some more in Photoshop, and maybe try it as a black and white conversion, I'm basically very pleased with the picture, and am glad I went to the bother of going back to the library for a re-shoot.

Its quite the space, isn't it. The architect in me wants to know if that glass overhead is obscured/translucent, or fully transparent - I can't tell if it was just cloudy outside, or if it's filtering the light coming in.